


The Psychology of Walking Underwater

by dearcaspian



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Amnesia, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Gen, John is sad, Other, Sherlock is a Mess, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-01
Updated: 2018-04-01
Packaged: 2019-04-16 23:21:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14175564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dearcaspian/pseuds/dearcaspian
Summary: Sherlock returned to Baker Street three years after faking his death not quite the same man as before.





	The Psychology of Walking Underwater

“And this is yours?”

Pausing, I glance up from slicing through a loaf of bread on the table, recently cleared of all its assorted chemistry equipment and miscellaneous test tubes. He’s gazing at me from across the room, one hand perched delicately on the keyboard of my partially open laptop.

I set the knife down. I’ve assured him of this twice today already, but I decide against reminding him of the fact.

“It’s mine,” I confirm. “Yours is upstairs.”

He nods, but not at me, and attempts a smile so uncharacteristic I feel dismayed by the attempt instead of reassured. Away from the computer he moves, to the cluttered desk over by the window.

I watch him carefully from the corner of my eye. There is something vague about the way he walks, all basic movements and no actual vigor, the blank puppet of an animator before the life is drawn in.

“And this… was also mine?”

He points at the mantelpiece above the quietly flickering fire.

“That’s yours too,” I say, indicating the skull.

“I see.”

He stares with an almost familiar intensity for a long moment, dark brows knit together in a furrow, lips moving subtly in an inaudible murmur - then he steps away and scales the coffee table, no concern or effort apparent. Papers scatter and an empty mug hits the floor with a soft thunk.

Apparently satisfied at something I am not aware of, he curls up at the far edge of the couch. I return to making dinner, unused to being unencumbered by abstruse experiments lying about where most people would lay dishes upon a drying rack.

Appreciation for the lack of mysterious stains or clinically divided human remains lying out in the open was not a sentiment I should have relished in. The tidiness in the kitchen wasn’t normal. Not his normal, anyways. The table was clear and the kitchen clean for all the wrong reasons.

“John?”

I continue cutting bread, wrapped in my own thoughts and deaf to his rumbling voice.

“John?”

So unaccustomed have I been these past three years to hearing him speak. The name sounds alien coming from him, a familiarity warped in the mouth of a dream. He tilts his head towards me with a distracted expression. If the accompanying crooked frown is any indication, he is not pleased either by how my name must have tasted.

Our eyes meet. I study his puzzled appearance. Sitting nestled up in a new blue dressing gown, knees gathered to his chin, he looks… small. A lanky six foot frame was reduced to a tangle of huddled limbs and hunched shoulders. There was something off about him; an emotion not present or too obvious along his clenched jaw line, a flicker settled between the curve of his lips. I wished to be hesitant around him. That feeling has been present ever since he returned.

Ignoring it, I look away. If I payed attention to it all of the time I’d waste hours in aimless skepticisms and an ever-deepening tunnel of reveries.

“Yes?” I ask.

“Did you miss me?”

The knife skitters forward in my grip. Blood begins to seep from a cut on my index finger, welling up and sliding in a single bead to the countertop. It’s only minor. I’ve experienced and seen much, much worse, but it feels like I just lost the finger.

I let out a quiet curse and gingerly put the knife down. His visage is still unchanged, save for a small fragment of unease settling deep into the creases at the corners of his eyes and the tightening of his mouth.

“Are you alright?” he asks, seeing the blood. He makes as if he’s going to get up but I wave him away in a languid fashion.

“No,” I lie conversationally, “it’s fine.” My head seems to have gone blank. “What do you mean, did you miss me?”

Unable to see through the falsehood, or perhaps unwilling to display if he does, he sits back and stares up at the ceiling. His palms fold together, cross against his chest, lay idly in his lap.

When he speaks it’s with his same eloquence. Yet his question carries the strange, adolescent reasoning of a child who ambles on curiously about any topic that catches their fancy.

“Did you miss me?” he repeats, scrutinizing the bullet holes in the wallpaper. Did he really want an answer? “Someone must have, after three years. Isn’t that a standard social convention? Humans miss others affiliated with their company, after a prolonged absence? Was I the kind of person to be missed?”

Carefully he regards me, absentmindedly probing one of the scorch marks on the wall. Waits for me to say something. Anything. After a long stretch of silence passes where I unsuccessfully search for words, I realize he isn’t going to clarify until I answer him first. Still stubborn.

“Of course you were missed” I tell him, coming out from the kitchen.

“That doesn’t answer the entire question.”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes,” he says quietly, “I think you do.”

The slander I could mar the truth with catches in my throat: yes, you were complacent and devoted to humanity’s emotional plight. You were grieved over by everyone. You were a normal and pleasant member of society, a person favorable among the population, revered in intellect and compassion. False, false, false.

The cruel foundations of my honesty pained me to consider.

However, as he continues to stare at me, I get the feeling he’s urging me to lie to him, reassure him otherwise. Did he consider himself along those aforementioned lies? Had he already confirmed that he stood in a different light? On the edge of falsehoods, I find myself shaking my head. A while back I promised myself I would always tell him the truth, regardless of what he asked.

“No,” I mutter. “You were not the kind of person to be missed, not from the average viewpoint.

“But you,” he presses, “you missed me?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

He sits up. I take a step back, suddenly aware of the blood trickling feebly down my palm.

“What do you mean?”

“Why did you miss me?”

“Sherlock-”

If I didn’t know better I would have said he was trying to antagonize me. These days, he doesn’t antagonize anyone on purpose.

His inquiry carries a hunger. It’s an itch, a pang of yearning to know, to distinguish where he now fits in a world that has forgotten him.

Urgent and waiting, I bite my tongue. “Why do you need to know?”

He glances at his hands, rubs his palms together thoughtfully.

“I have no idea, if I’m honest,” he says slowly. “It feels… important. It nags at me. Perhaps I wanted someone to miss me, and you most of all, though I’m completely oblivious as to why.”

I open my mouth, abruptly close it again. Once more I am at a lack of words. I shift away to the sink and turn on the faucet, holding the cut beneath it, mesmerized by the thin stream of red and water swirling down the drain.

“You’re avoiding the question.”

The cut burns.

“John?” he says softly.

With a quick flick of my wrist I switch the faucet on full blast. The rush of water reverberates loudly across the flat, drowning out the silence gone unsaid between us.

 

It’s been two weeks since he’s returned. Two weeks, and I still panic each time I hear his steps clattering up and down the stairs or catch sight of his coat and scarf returned once more to the coat rack. My leg grows numb and my lungs constrict and it becomes difficult to force a coherent thought other than alarm or confusion whenever I delve too deep into the reasons why. Each time I turn a corner I’m momentarily convinced I’ve come upon a ghost - some phantom hallucination come back to taunt me from that other obscure world where the dead pass into. Each time I have to remind myself he’s real, that my mind is not betraying me. The nightmares came to an end a long time ago, anyways. A man can only meet his demons so many times before they grow bored.

If he notices my behavior, he doesn't say so. Then again, it’s probably not unusual for him. Wondering what he must think of me sometimes makes me chuckle; other times it makes me afraid.

My apprehension is not the only new thing I’ve been adjusting to. The flat is clean, for one. It remained untouched for so long, a cluttered tomb I shuffled through each day. I fell prey to the misconjecture that perhaps bits of him would remain in the mess, the test tubes arranged in neat little rows, the dust on the curtains, the yellow face on the wall. Only a month prior did Mrs. Hudson beg me to tidy up. I did so with partial unwillingness, caught somewhere between the oddest sense of betrayal, and facing the inevitable ending of something I was not yet ready to come to terms with.

I threw nothing away. I shoved it all upstairs, shutting it selfishly up in four dark walls, things for another day, things to look upon again when I rediscovered the courage that soldier I had been still carried.

Food fills the kitchen in decent abundance. It is oddly yearned after and simultaneously disliked for its strange twisting of normal and atypical. None of it is tainted with stolen oddities from the morgue. Heads don’t spontaneously appear on the middle shelf in the fridge. If I’m honest, I will never miss unearthing ears in the kettle; but I do miss the idea of it.

He is, of course, the newest adjustment of all.

Some mannerisms and conventions changed while he was away. Constantly he has to make sure certain things are his, a possessiveness that feels like a desperate kind of craving, as if nothing once belonging to him must be taken away again.

Once, when hanging up my coat on the rack, my hand accidentally brushed against the black wool of his own. I received a glare so astringent I immediately jerked away.

This isn’t the only way he deviates from the man I once knew. Gone are the sleek two button suits in favor of jeans and simple shirts, a replacement which leaves him looking wildly out of place.

The violin doesn’t carry the fascination it used to. He still plucks at it occasionally with slow, tentative fingers, as if perplexed by how they move among the notes of their own accord. He can’t use his bow. Two years and seven months ago I snapped it in two.

He doesn’t shoot, or appear to be familiar with a gun. He tries to make jokes. He still doesn’t talk for the majority of the time, but when he does, it’s as if he actually wishes to hear what the other person has to say.

When I see these things and so many others, the pieces and scraps of everyday life no one else would notice, I am reminded. When he does something offhandedly and it brings a smile to my face, or elicits a laugh with a sarcastic remark, I am at my loneliest. Nostalgia is a hard burden. I’m forced to recall for the thousandth time he’s not the same man.

How much of him returned? How much is left out there, drifting inside dandelion seed wishes on the wind?

Greed and petulance are common weights upon my shoulders. So what if he’s not the same? People change. What he experienced the past three years must be nothing I am able to judge. I should be overjoyed he’s alive, and I am.

Disturbing me the most is the thought that in the absence of some far fetched luck, he might not have come back at all. Perhaps this was a freak accident, and he never planned to return at midnight on the doorstep, bleary eyed with only my face to his name. Losing his memory could be the only catalyst that goaded him into following what little imprints of 221B that remained in his mind back to Baker Street. Otherwise, he would have kept away for the rest of his life, indefinitely, the reason for which I don't think I'll ever guess at.

Perhaps he is the remainder of an attempt to erase everything, because he didn't want to recall what he'd done to me, to everyone else, in faking his death - the reasons for this, too, I still don’t know.

I dismiss this thought immediately, guilty. Whatever he is, then or now, he's never been a coward.

Perhaps, lastly, someone else could have done this to him on purpose. I consider the rest of Moriarty's criminal empire still out there, building itself back up in the shadows, children of the spider repairing the web, escaped from the nest without their leader. It's possible. Very possible.

Until he regains these memories, if ever, we'll never understand what really happened. I can only speculate, and poorly at best.

Sometimes, I think speculating will be the end of me.

 

-

 

He came back on a Saturday, fifteen days ago. Remembering for him might be hard, but for me the recollections come all too easy.

I’m alone in the flat, perched in my armchair by the window, a book held loosely in my hands. I browse the page listlessly, not really taking in the information. All is quiet, a peaceful sort of silence. The room feels emptier than usual. The only sound in the background is the monotonous ticking of the wall clock.

I sigh, inhaling the stuffy air. This book isn’t interesting. I’m not sure why I bothered picking it up in the first place. I promised myself a few days ago I’d actually take time to read one or two of the novels cluttered on the shelf by the window, but it was proving a more difficult task than expected. They had been neglected over the past months, collecting an impressive layer of dust.

Tugging at the hem of my jumper, I glance up at the clock, then back down at the weighty volume. Too many types of tobacco ash to memorize. I should gaze upon it with affection, but the self published monograph only brings me a strange resentment.

I shut the book with a sharp snap. Dust rises from the pages. Sneezing, I stand up stiffly from the chair and stretch, spine protesting with a series of painful pops. It’s almost midnight; I’ve been sitting here much later than previously thought.

Outside, the sky is black and lacking any sign of starlight. I see a faint sliver of moonlight up in the corner of the topmost window pane. The alabaster glow bathes the street below in a wn light, coaxing up shadows in unlikely places. It looks unsettling. Sighing once more, I turn away and replace the book, wedging it between two others where I won’t be likely to come across it again.

I feel too awake to sleep. If I were in the mood for conversation, Mrs Hudson would surely be willing to comply, but it isn’t likely she’d be up at this hour.

Taking a moment, I study the room around me. It’s clean, everything where it should be and yet should not. I tidied it up just last week, unwillingly convinced by Mrs. Hudson’s pleading. I didn’t deserve to live in such a state of decay, she pressed. She was exaggerating, of course, but I understood what she meant.

For a few minutes longer I hover there, wandering aimlessly from one feature of the flat to the next, when the sound of a door slamming floats up from above.

Muscles contract in automatic alert. In the span of a second I am at the door, alarm prickling along the bottom of my feet. Slowly I ease down the handle of the door and pry it forward an inch. I peer around the frame only to step back, exclaiming in a strained whisper: “Mrs. Hudson!”

She points down at the hall below, slight panic obvious. “Someone’s down there.”

I pause to listen. A faint racket echoes up, a rustling, hissing sort of noise, like someone sliding along the floor. Then comes a dim thump, and eerie silence.

We look at each other. In wordless assent I disappear into the flat and return with my gun

She nods silently and lets me pass, retreating to where she can lurk anxiously around the corner.

I move quietly down the stairs, handgun clasped securely. This doesn’t sound like a peculiar midnight visitor, it sounds like a break-in. The darkness enveloping the hall below reveals nothing. Shadows curl in the corners, twisting around the faint imprint of moonlight spilling through the crack underneath the door. Carefully I search the gloom, taking each worn step with a sense of steady determination.

That’s when I see him.

He lies there motionless. As my eyes adjust I make out the familiar shape of his form, lean and gangly from head to foot, austere, sharp, angular. He’s sprawled out on the floor, every limb positioned at an awkward angle. A vacant stillness surrounds him, a disquieting similarity to the atmosphere at the heart of a funeral. He’s clad in the same coat, the same scarf. Even in the dark I can see those lack curls tumbling off his forehead, much longer than I had seen them last.

A wave of caustic disbelief hits me. The gun slips loosely from my fingers and clatters to the floor with a certain, deafening finality. I find that the hallway and the floor beneath me no longer exist. It’s just me and the ghost. His ghost, a hallucination meant to torment.

There is a clattering in the near distance as if someone is pounding on the door. I try to shut it out until I realize it’s my own heartbeat throbbing in my ears. Another cacophony follows quickly after, a short, piercing scream. Mrs. Hudson races down the stairs behind me.

“John!” she shouts, trembling, “John, that can’t be him.”

I turn to her, confused. How could she be privy to the phantom generated from my thoughts alone? I continue to stare at her, flustered until she grabs my arm and gently spins me around.

“Look, John!” she says, half bewildered, half awed. “Isn’t that him?’

I look. Again I see him collapsed on the floorboards. I want to edge away but I force myself to stare, suspicion and disbelief wavering into something altogether new. Vigilant, I take two steps forward. My knees bend of their own accord and then I’m kneeling on the floor, the wood a chilly and stark reminder of reality beneath me.

With a shaky hand I reach out and prod, none too gently, his left shoulder. The jab elicits a sharp intake of breath. He feels solid. Too solid for a ghost, too absolute for an illusion.

“It’s him,” Mrs. Hudson whispers. “How is that possible?”

Her words jar me into action. If this is real - and the more I consider him, the more I know it is - how is he alive? Why now, of all times and places?

The landlady stands close behind me, excited and afraid. I wish I could mirror her, but I am too dumbstruck to do anything other than reach out again at the detective lying before me.

At my touch his eyes open with a groan.

He looks up at me, takes me in: the way my frame is practically paralyzed, my shock and astonishment, the bitter and betrayed tightening of my throat. It’s forever before he speaks. It’s years, it’s a lifetime of waiting and unanswered pleas to deities who no longer bother to listen.

With a strangled little huff of air, he leans his head back down on the wooden boards of the foyer and closes his eyes. Mrs. Hudson chokes up behind me but I’m too focused on him.

“John?” he whispers.

I want to revel in the simple sound of my own name, but I can’t. Elation and distress wind together too closely to make the feeling palatable. I could spend years answering him, regrets and promises and questions piling up on my tongue. Instead, I turn to Mrs. Hudson.

“Get the medical kit from upstairs,” I order, the old soldier asserting himself.

She clatters up the stairs without argument.

“John?”

I lean over him, wiping away the blood trickling down his face with the hem of my sleeve. He opens his eyes again at the tentative touch. They flutter about aimlessly, wildly, before settling on me.

“John.”

An insult or proclamation of blasphemy couldn’t have hurt more.

“Yes?”

The singular word is a catalyst. His breathing races shallow before he calms down, hands clenching and uncurling weakly at his sides.

“You’re… you’re John, right?” he rasps, the monumental effort of speaking taking a toll.

I sit back, astounded. “Of course I am,” I say, furrowing my brow. “I’m… I’ve…”

He tilts his chin down in the tiniest of affirmations.

“Good. That’s good,” he breathes, and dissolves into unconsciousness with a slump.

I don’t hear Mrs. Hudson return, don’t feel her shove the medical kit into my arms. I patch him up and categorize his injuries - cracked rib, mild blow to the head above his left ear with a blunt instrument, twisted ankle, black eye. I take stock of these afflictions with the absent minded determination of an army doctor going through another routine on a random civilian. It is a zone I fall into where I forget my surroundings entirely. I don’t feel the strain on my limbs as we, somehow, manage to drag him up the stairs and onto the couch. I’m not aware of anything as I sit in the armchair, chin resting in my hand, watching as Mrs. Hudson shuffles to and fro, busying herself in making tea, her chatter rising like a tempest in the background.

I curl up in an attempt to make myself small. I can’t think, can’t look at him, slung unaware across the couch, bedraggled and dirty with blood drying on his hairline - because I know. It’s visible throughout the emptiness in his eye, the colorless planes of his face, blank and barren. It’s visible in the absence of animation and powerful sentiment his slack expression once carried. It was there all along; I just didn’t want to acknowledge it.

He doesn’t remember.

Is it temporary? I wonder. Is he so dazed he can’t recall me? Will he wake and explain why he isn’t dead? Having the constant of that vast mind reduced into nothing is not a possibility I am willing to accept.

Grief twists a winding path along my arms and legs, hollow, bitter. For all of the wondering as to what is going to happen tomorrow, I still can’t help but think to myself: maybe he hasn’t really come back at all.

 

-

 

“You knew?”

It is an accusation more than a question, careless and loud. Mycroft stares up at me, unabashed, from the armchair he’s currently seated in. He looks at ease, too comfortable for this kind of conversation. I’ve given no other indication to what I mean outside of those two words, yet he understands exactly what I’m talking about.

“John,” he intones in a low, listless voice. He casts a furtive glance around where other various unsociable gentlemen are seated, browsing through newspapers and politely ignoring one another. The slightest whisper in a place like this comes across as a tempest, but the desire to remain introverted must outweigh any curiosity I could be attracting. “Don’t you think we should discuss this elsewhere?”

I clench my fists at my sides. His composure never fails to irritate me. He is the master of the objective viewpoint, observing every situation with an impartial and unemotional perspective. I suppose that’s where we differ the most. His lack of ambition prefers to sit back and advise.

“Should we?” I say sarcastically. “Will they throw us out?”

I instantly regret the angry retort. They probably will toss us out. The rules border on bizarre here.

Mycroft sets his book aside. “Perhaps,” he says with a shrug. “To be on the safe side, let us continue this in a less, ah… public place.”

He rises from the armchair, slowly, and walks with a leisurely pace to a door in the far corner. I follow behind, noticing how despite our unusual confrontation, no one is looking at us still. I almost wish they would, so I would have something else to focus on. My eyes dart aimlessly about the extensively ornate room until we finally pass through into a much smaller side office. He closes the door behind us.

“Now,” he says, turning to me. “You were saying?”

I expect mockery or ridicule in his voice, but after a long examination of his expression, I bite back my indignant response. He studies me with neither contempt nor scorn. On any other man, I would have mistaken it for kindness.

I gaze back, puzzled. He doesn’t smile, but continues to watch me in tandem, waiting for an answer.

I quirk an eyebrow. “You knew,” I repeat. “This entire time, you knew.”

He nods in assent. His calm demeanor may irritate me, but I can’t begrudge him for it. In another lifetime, maybe, I could have respected it.

“I take this to mean he has returned, then?” he asks.

“You didn’t know?”

“No.”

He wanders over to the mahogany desk in the center of the floor and glances down at the papers spread there. “What has he told you of it all so far?”

“Nothing,” I remark bitterly, “because he doesn’t remember.”

Mycroft focuses on me in an instant. What sympathy had lingered in his face is gone.

“What do you mean, doesn’t remember?”

“He doesn’t know me,” I insist, bewildered. I had thought Mycroft knew everything, and due to reasons of his own had decided to keep away from the flat. The longer I take in his tightened features, the severe and serious set to his clenched jaw, the more I realize he was just as unaware of the fact as I.

“He doesn’t recall anything. Only his name and for some reason, mine. Nothing about London, or what he does, or where he’s been the past three years.”

“Explain,” he tells me tersely.

“There’s not much to tell. Two days ago he appeared at Baker Street at midnight. He was a little battered, but otherwise intact. Yesterday he woke and hasn’t been able to recall anything, only that he believes he’s supposed to be here for some reason.”

He takes in the information as coolly as if we had been discussing the weather. I am glad for his mask then, because he doesn’t ask me to elaborate.

“How did you discover I knew about him this whole time?” he inquires, steady and strict. “Now giving into spying, are we?”

“No. A letter fell out of his coat pocket this morning, a response from you to something he had written earlier, signed respectively with an _M_. It was dated two and a half years ago.”

“Hmm.” He moves around the desk. “I never knew him to be sentimental of keepsakes, even as a child.”

“This is not about sentiment,” I say, fingernails biting half moons into my palms. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because, John Watson, it was for your own good.”

I force a laugh. “Really?”

“Yes. He’ll have to explain it to you.”

“If he ever can.”

Mycroft circles to face me. Something akin to anger lingers briefly, and then dissipates. “If anything, this is all about sentiment,” he says quietly. “I can see you have not reacted well to his return. Perhaps you were hoping he would come back the same individual you parted so suddenly with three years ago. Right?”

The thought he might be browsing languidly through the inner workings of my consciousness unnerves me. I forgot often that the elder brother could sometimes make more brilliant deductions than the younger, when he wished. Still, I agree.

“Yes. Of course. Weren’t you?”

Ignoring the question, he traces a line in the wood of the desk with one neatly trimmed fingernail. “I kept in contact with him for the first year. He notified me a few months after the ‘incident’. We responded back and forth through letters mainly, though he never gave a return address. After a time, he ceased communication with me. None of my efforts succeeded in tracking him down. He was, for all intents, the ghost London had thought he had become. Now what could have happened?”

“I don’t know,” I admit. “I came here hoping you could tell me.”

“I cannot. However, I’ll stop by and judge it all for myself in a few days, if you wish.”

“A few?”

“Some memories may have returned by then, rendering a visit unnecessary. I imagine anyone would not take comfortably to meeting a stranger who claims so close a relation. I’d rather avoid a lengthy, awkward explanation.

Only later does this occur to me as a deflection.

“Fine.” I cross my arms. It seems like there’s nothing else I can say to him. All of the fight has gone out of me, expelled from my skin. “Are there any reports of him throughout…?”

“Not a single one. He is still dead to the public, and I suggest you keep him that way for as long as possible.”

“The public could hold answers.”

“And unwanted attention.”

He fixes me with an unwavering stare. “Treat the situation gently, John. Do not ask unless he prompts you first. Amnesia is a delicate offender.”

“I’m aware.”

“Yes. You are also sentimental. Let it come to him on his own terms, at least for now.”

 

I turn from the window, the memory disappearing into the back of my mind like fall winds sweeping away the scents of summer, effortlessly, finishing before one realizes it. I feel confused as summer must, morphed into something new without the chance to protest. I look down to my feet. Next I’ll wither into autumn leaves, and then settle frostbitten into winter, brittle bones, muscles iced over.

It’s been two weeks now, and Mycroft has still not visited. Both Lestrade and Molly have come, only at my discreet request. They and Mrs. Hudson, excluding Mycroft, are the only three currently carrying the weight of his apparent resurrection. He doesn’t recognize any of them. Lestrade bordered on an emotional outburst, while Molly remained quiet for the ten minutes the two stood in the doorway. She knows of something. I’ll have to ask her eventually.

He progresses much the same every day, accustoming himself with his surroundings. In some ways he is exactly how he used to be, sharp in manner and observations, irregular in his habits, analytical to a fault. His mind still teems with knowledge; he’s made his way through half the bookshelf now. Yet, most remains foreign. There are times when I see him gazing hard at something, on the verge of summoning back forgotten layers of the subconscious. Then it fades. He makes no demands for himself, few complaints. I wonder often what’s really keeping him here in Baker Street with veritable unknowns.

He is occasionally as wary of me as I am of him. We are two magnets with opposite charges, circling each other, neither wanting to get too close lest we accidentally connect. It’s obvious when he looks at me. Our relation as tandem strangers is sure, but lopsided. I remember him the way he was before; he doesn’t really know anything about me at all.

We do talk. He questions me, I question him, never inquiries of importance. We discuss books of the news or philosophy. He doesn’t ask about himself, except for what belonged to him. That, I know, is a part of him which remained the past years. He’s still unwilling to ask for help, so immersed in pride and the desire to figure it all out for himself. The thought reassures me. He’s determined and stubborn enough to do it.

None of us have let him know that he faked his death. No one has told him he used to be a detective. If he has become aware of it on his own time, he hasn’t alluded to it. How he couldn’t find this own on his own, I can’t understand. Fragments of his past life still litter the rooms he has not yet tried to leave, tiny clues on the fireplace, in the kitchen, on the table. The news ceased reports of his suicide a long while back, and have not mentioned it since. I owe them for that.

 

I’m sitting in the armchair that last night of the second week when I ask him the question that’s been circling around my head all day.

“What’s it like?”

He turns to look at me. The sharp, discordant notes plucked aimlessly from the violin under his fingertips stagger off into silence. Despite whatever he’s been through I know part of  continues to retain the ability to understand the unspoken: what’s it like in that funny odd head nowadays?”

He humors me anyways.

“What do you mean?”

I begin to automatically feel self conscious beneath that glare, until I notice it’s mostly empty. He swivels back around to look out the window.

The sunset outside is beautiful, casting rays of amber and pale pink through the panes to set the room aflame in a soft wash of light. It dances a contrast against the dark curls unkempt on his head, highlighting notes of deep brown I did not remember existing before and the healing scrapes and scratches on his skin.

“You know what I mean,” I say, daring to tiptoe on his privacy for the first time.

After a few fleeting moments, he nods. He sets the violin down carefully, both fond and unfamiliar of its curves, a parent relinquishing a newborn they have not yet had time to become properly acquainted with.

“It is…” he begins, then pauses. I wait patiently, taking in the stray curl falling haphazardly into his eye, the heather blue t-shirt. The clothes look odd on him still; another person’s normal.

“Attempting to remember, “ he says, “to distinguish it all, to interpret it… it’s as if I’m walking underwater.”

I picture this: arms reaching slowly out, legs churning up sand but getting nowhere, panicked body silhouetted in the unearthly blue-green glow of atrophied sunlight broken apart as it falls through the water from above. He’s suspended indefinitely while fish and fragments of colorful coral pass him by, oblivious to the last of the air bubbles slipping from his mouth.  It’s an accurate description, and I am at a loss for an answer which would comfort and console those pale limbs in the sea, running in place.

I can help, I could say. Just ask me. All you have to do is ask.

Under the spotlight of his stare, I get up and walk out the door. In some aspects, I am unforgivably selfish.

 

-

 

The first thing he says when he arrives is, “Do you recognize me?”

It’s spoken with control, in the same listless manner in which he says everything, Beneath it I can almost convince myself of a flurry of words gone unsaid waiting to tumble out, struggling against the dam. He is the epitome of restraint. Three years, and he stands there in the room with his umbrella as if this is another social call to another various acquaintance.

I hate him for it.

Three years, and the gap between the two is still that wide. But he is not that kind of person, even if I wanted him to be at this moment. I let my anger go. I get the feeling he’s been waiting to say those words for a long, long time.

He’s dressed immaculately, as always. He stands there watching his brother with an indiscernible expression, save for the interested light gleaming subtly in his eyes as he surveys the surroundings before quickly turning his attention back to Sherlock.

“Well?”

Sherlock has not even glanced up from the sheet of partially written music on his lap. He’s begun composing again, an artist deprived of his medium after a tumultuous and confusing separation. All of the songs have a melancholy feel, performed with fingers plucking the strings, as there’s still no bow.

The silence stretches. After a minute, Mycroft quirks an eyebrow and stares at me pointedly.

“Sherlock,” I hiss. “Stop ignoring him.”

He looks up in displeasure.

We both turn our gaze to the man in the dark suit. It’s taken him two and a half weeks for him to come, even after I visited the Diogenes Club. I have to think that he’s just so busy this was the only time he could get away. Most likely it is the truth, but I get the impression there are other meanings behind his absence.

Sherlock scrutinizes him for what feels like hours. In reality, his sweeping study of Mycroft’s appearance lasts a few seconds. I follow his line of vision, trailing over Mycroft’s face, his hands, his polished shoes, the umbrella propped at an angle against the door. He takes him in silently, still the observer easily lost in his investigations. I wonder fleetingly if he had even heard Mycroft’s question, but then he speaks, and my shoulders fall.

“No.”

I’m not sure what I’m expecting: rage, a somber plea, a calculated assessment of the human mind and its inner functions. I am not familiar enough with Mycroft to be able to guess his reactions. Out of the two siblings, I believe he is the most difficult to understand. A man with no relatable ambition, regardless of intelligence, position or influence, rarely has intentions visible to others.

“Nothing at all?” Mycroft prompts. “Think. You’re ever so good at it.”

I watch him thoughtfully. The two are having a staring match, Mycroft with the cynical, unamused countenance he normally carries and a distracted air hinting at something deeper on his mind, and Sherlock with a cold, intrepid sort of smile not borne out of any measure of cheer. I lose track of time, flicking back and forth from brother to brother, a sickening sensation settling in my stomach.

Sherlock is the first to break the stand off.

“You work for the government,” he says. “And you provide intelligence on a freelance basis for other organizations. Coffee drinker, unmarried, heavily involved in affairs some consider to be too high above your status, but this status is one you have made on our own.”

“Correct,” Mycroft says drily. “Anything else?”

Sherlock hesitates. I can almost visualize the algorithms running through his head, the process of grasping at threads unraveling to reveal no answers, sorting what little knowledge he has and eliminating what does not fit. I see little pieces of light, fragments coming up unexpectedly like fireflies in the darkness.

“No,” he says, and the light disappears.

Mycroft sighs. It’s a heavy, shuddering sort of sigh, too deep for someone of his temperament. He reaches for his umbrella and taps it against the floor.

“Well, Doctor Watson,” he says, turning to me. “I told you I would come and view the situation for myself.”

I nod.

“So I have. If I cannot coax up any sort of memory, and you, the person who was undoubtedly closest to him cannot as well, then there is little I can propose beyond modern psychology.”

Something in me sinks. Up to this point, I had been hoping Mycroft would be the one to figure it all out. If the very sight and sound of his brother couldn’t drudge up the fainest memory other than obscure facts derived from simple observation…

“Hold on,” Sherlock interrupts. “Did I know you?”

Mycroft ignores him, and I hate him even more for that. He reaches into his coat and pulls out a tiny photo album, its outer casing cracked from the wear of time.

“Let him look through this,” he says. “It may, ah, help.”

He places it on the coffee table and then heads for the door, his pace as languid as ever, umbrella tapping out his steps beside him. I don’t call after him. Sherlock doesn’t either.

“John?” he asks when Mycroft disappears down the stairs. “Did I know him?”

I can’t bring myself to answer.

Struck with a sudden urge, I move purposefully across the room. On the street below I see Mycroft emerge out onto the sidewalk to a sleek car waiting in the street.

In the seconds before he steps gracefully into the darkened interior, I see it: a tiny twitch of his fingers, a subtle quivering of lips. His need for detachment, his impassive reactions and emotional paralysis, become undeniably obvious.

I turn back to Sherlock, standing there behind me.  
“Let’s go for a walk,” I say.

“Why?”

“Let’s just go.”

 

We wind through London streets as the afternoon sun beings to descent over the city skyline in the distance. It’s far too warm for coats, yet he wears his anyways. Passerbys pay us no heed. I fear little of recognition, too tired for considering any consequences.

“Isn’t that uncomfortable?” I ask, indicating his clothing.

“A little,” he admits.

“Then why are you wearing it?”

“I always do.”

He halts in the center of the sidewalk for just a moment. I stop beside him.

“What?”

“It’s nothing important.” He sounds irritated, as if on the brink of discovery only to see it tumble down into the depths all too quickly. Abruptly he continues walking, and after a second I follow.

We stroll onward like this for a while, slowly relaxing into the settling evening and each absorbed in our own thoughts, a respectful distance between us, a stranger and the stranger he knows but doesn’t know him. Within the first few days I cajoled hi, to take a walk through some of the streets nearby under the forgiving cover of a starless night, to see if perhaps anything would strike him as familiar. It didn’t. Looking over at him now, I see he has the same glint in his eye he always carried whenever he observed the city around him, an appreciation for the strange, severely and unlikely found beauty London presented. That look gives me a feeble hope.

I notice him studying me, now. Quickly I avert my eyes, and then decide I’ve been doing that too much as of late. I stare straight back.

He slows. Stops altogether. I pause too, and then we’re standing beside a pub in the fading light from which the jangle of discordant music echoes through the doors. We are two statues contemplating one another unabashed, fully and out in the open for what I suppose is the first time.

“My apologies, John,” he says.

I’m startled. The only time I recall he has ever apologized for anything was during the case at Baskerville. Even then, he was indirect about it.

“What for?” I ask.

He shrugs. The movement seems too casual for what follows.

“For not being who you want me to be. Who anyone wants me to be these days.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I stutter. “It’s not your fault.”

As soon as the words leave my mouth, I falter. It’s not his fault. It was never his fault. He is the same man regardless and I’ve been treating him this whole time as if…

It’s unfair. I’ve been so unfair, cloaked up in my own emotions to give him the opportunity for him to explain how he’s been handling all of this or how he must feel in response to the eggshells we litter and tread on around him.

I remember Mycroft’s words: treat the situation fairly. I had been mistaking them until now.

I look up at him. If we had switched places, would he be treating me the same way? Not getting too close, not allowing me to go too far away, uncertain how to close the gaps but afraid to try?

Remorse is a staggering weight.

“It’s okay,” he says quietly. There is none of the usual detachment in his tone. “It’s excusable. This-” here he bites down on the word, “this Sherlock you knew before, he’s still here. We’ll find him.”

An argument would be easier to take than this calm front. I want him to be angry. He should be furious with me.

“It’s not,” I tell him. “I’ve been regarding you-”

“In a way that is not unusual to me, because I don’t know how you treated me before and therefore I have nothing to compare it to. It’s alright. I’m not angry. It’s understandable. My only irritants are the memories I can’t pull back.”

I get the sense of an ending, or beginning, or continuation. Music from the pub drifts into the sudden silence. Perhaps it’s time to know, even if knowing might hurt him.

I could be a catalyst to recovery. Up until now I’ve been withholding a well of information, and to cowardice I refuse to yield any longer.

So I talk. I tell him he heralded the consulting detective forefront. I tell him about his cases and the distaste he held for the way I wrote about them, emotional viewpoints romanticising the whole procedure and eliminating the importance of singular facts. I tell him about that night in the hollow on the moors at Baskerville, about the deerstalker cap, about Irene. I tell him he was nearly impossible to deal with and we quarreled over everything but neither of us ever made an attempt to leave. We discuss how he never bought the groceries. I let him know he was arrogant and complicated but at the end of the day he was always the person I could trust the most. We stand there talking until the moon grows bright and countless people going to and fro pass us by, two oddities laughing and frowning and glaring in equal measure.

I don’t tell him about Moriarty.

When I run out of things to say and close my mouth and look away, by some unsaid agreement we begin walking home. When we get there, he sits down and picks up the photo album. He begins to browse through it page by page, examining with care each photograph preserved safely behind slips of yellowed plastic, gaze lingering on some, fingertips on others. We sit there withholding words, the gap foreseeably closer than before.

 

-  


“How could this possibly be incorrect?”

“It makes absolutely no sense.”

“It’s in the rules, you know. The little sheet you tossed in the corner there?”

“It’s illogical.”

“It’s only a game.”

“In the parameters of a real life crime, it would be highly illogical.”

“Well this is clearly not real life. You’re telling me that even though the card proves it’s right, the game is lying to us.”

“Do you have a better explanation.”

“No-”

“Don’t make accusations if you can’t back them up.”

“Can you back your accusation up?”

“Of course. Would you like me to?”

“Oh God, no.”

I place my cards face down, trying to stifle a smile despite my irritation. He sits across from me, cards held carelessly between two fingers. Part of me suspects he wishes thos cards were cigarettes, but Mrs. Hudson and I have diligently kept him away from a single one since he returned. He loathes us for it. I relish the familiarity of that loathing.

“Then explain how it was the rope,” he tells me, motioning at the game board.

“Because I shuffled the cards and picked by random selection?”

He shakes his head, ignoring me. “Why did I bother to play this?”

“Because you wanted to ruin it for me forever?”  
I try not to laugh as he tosses his cards down and pushes away from the table. He flops down on the couch, exasperated, disdainful. I pack up the game and put it somewhere he won’t be able to find it again, so this particular cycle of events can’t be repeated for at least another month: curiosity, a personal endeavour to prove the game wrong, and then disgust at how the rules never bend to his liking.

Few things are to his liking, recently. I relish the familiarity of that, too.

A routine has developed over the past three months, a type or normalcy that’s as close as it will ever get to how it once was. An irregular routine, as he is still a man of varying and disconnected habits. They shouldn’t really be called habits at all. Pieces of his personality and social tendencies are coming back, slowly, and often without him noticing it. He’ll say or do something and then pause as if another man had spoken or acted for him, another mind asserting itself.

I have promised myself not to lie to him any longer, but still haven’t properly answered his original question, the one moving through my mind each night: _did you miss me, John Watson?_

With a yawn, I stand from the chair and stretch. He still hasn’t moved although he landed in an uncomfortable looking angle. His dressing gown is twisted around his ankles, and he stares up at the ceiling like he hopes it will catch on fire soon to alleviate his boredom.

I take a seat in the space he has left and shove his feet to the side.

“There are other places to sit, John,” he declares crossly.

“Yes, but I happened to choose this one,” I say.

“It’s taken.”

“Not anymore.”

He sighs testily, but moves over anyways.

We sit in peace for a while, occupied in our own reflections and daydreams. Morning sun spills through the curtains. I let my thoughts wander, content, until I come upon the violin propper up next to the fireplace. A bow, newly purchased by me, sits next to it.

“How is the composing coming?” I ask. He’s been writing furiously for the past few days. Sheets litter one of the armchairs, piled on top of each other, some complete while others contain a few scribbled notes.

“Good,” he says. He leans up and rests the back of his head against the wall. “Why?”

“I’m just wondering.”

“You never just wonder,” he says, not unkindly.

“I did notice what you’ve titled it.”

“And?”

  
“Is it about-”

“Obviously.”

I get that sense I’ve had so many times since he came back that he wants to tell me something. Whatever it is, he keeps it to himself and turns away. We lapse into ourselves again. I say nothing of his struggles to remember lying across the room in the from of notes upon ivory paper.

This isn’t so much a routine as it is a facsimile of one. Holes remain that I can’t fill, gaps in our conversations which whisper of a search for steady footing with which we can begin upon. We do talk more; that night we spent discussing his forgotten life changed a course of events I couldn’t previously control. I find no fear in hearing him speak nowadays, in seeing him come around the corner. It is okay to befriend this old and new version again.

Periodically, I dream he disappears. I never tell him, but I think he knows anyways.

“You’ll have to tell me one day how you do that,” I say, bringing back up the topic.

“Compose music?”

“Tell stories through music.”

He frowns. “I could teach you to play.”

“Really?”

“Why not? However, you’re not naturally dispositioned to have a talent with music so you’ll likely be horrible at it.”

“How kind.”

“I can try anyways.”

The tiniest of smiles flickers across his face.

“Does Mycroft play?” I ask, then instantly regret it. He dismisses my apprehension easily.

“I believe that Mycroft… could compose a whole symphony if he wanted to. He is startling easy to observe.”

Mycroft came around once more, a few days ago. The two sat and spoke for hours. I was curious to hear the conversation, but out of respect I left and let them talk privately. I wonder if their relationship will stay the same as it once was, strained, distant and competitive, a constant game of chess. If not, it will become one good thing to come of this.

“What else is easy to observe?” I say. I forgo an elaboration; he knows what I mean.

“People. CIrcumstances. Relationships.”

Hope lances through me. That’s how it used to be, I think.

As if he had heard me, he says quietly, “As far as I can remember up until I came here, it has been that way. I see, but the implications are not always immediate. Not all the time. It’s growing clearer.”

“Am I… clear?”

We’re moving towards a topic of conversation which felt off limits before. This was obscure and uncharted territory. I hadn’t dared to ask him before and hesitancy lingers deeply in my question now, a hopeful disbelief, surely I’ll wake up tomorrow to the sound of gunshots and chemical experiments simmering on the countertops.

He stares into the empty fireplace. My tension dissolve into patience, the lull between us teeming.

Eventually he looks at me.

“I’ve never had trouble recalling you,” he says.

“What?”

He scoffs, as if having to explain an easily apparent fact to a small child, but his indecision is evident.

“You,” he says slowly. “You drew me here initially, to Baker Street. The past three years are empty and the rest before a disconnected blur, but you have remained a beacon, the only familiar piece in this little puzzle. I can’t remember how I got here, only that I needed to be because of you. You’re a stranger, but I’ve always known you.”

I regard him carefully, struck at the uncharacteristic honesty. A slow, helpless smile spreads across my face.

“That makes no sense.”

“I figured,” he grumbles, but he’s smiling, too.

This is a conversation which we may have to carry over the next few months, each time uncovering new sincerities or turning over the same problems as before. I can’t solve this overnight. It is going to take time, and effort, and more empathy than I believe we are both used to sharing, but it’s worth it. Despite his eccentricities and his tendencies to insult everyone within a five mile radius and the way he considers the freezer as a storage for corpses, he’s always worth it.

We might never know what happened. I suppose, in the end, it may not matter. He’s here, and alive. I can help him remember, if he wants me assistance. I can help him forget. We can ease back into a new life. He has changed, and by association, so have I. If this is for worse or better, I haven’t discovered yet.

His memories might have forsaken him, but I have decided I will not do the same.

My phone rings. Brow furrowed, I pull it from my pocket and study the screen with some surprise.

Sherlock watches me intently as I answer. After a moment, I pull it away from my ear.

“Lestrade?” I ask.

He nods thoughtfully. “Visited two and a half months ago. Detective inspector, no natural insight, too prone to seize the first solution which comes along in and abandon the more likely probability. I believe I assisted him with a few small problems.”

I roll my eyes, but when I speak, my voice is wary and controlled.

“He says he has a case he would like some help with. Requires some help with, actually.”

Lestrade’s voice comes through the receiver, tinny in the background. I ignore it for the sake of what I can see dancing through Sherlock’s eyes, a rushing river of thought. This decision may be the biggest one he’s had yet to make.

He never gives an answer; actions were enough. He strides into his bedroom, returning two minutes later, dressing gown abandoned for proper clothes.

I watch in fascination and a building exhilaration as he plucks his dark wool coat from the rack. When he turns, one eyebrow is skeptically raised, a partial, annoyed frown on his lips.

“Are you coming?”

Grinning, I hold the phone back up.

“We’ll be there in ten.”

**Author's Note:**

> This was written quite a few years prior to posting, and my writing style has changed greatly since then. Despite the plot holes, lack of editing and repetition I still remain weirdly fond of this for having been the longest thing I had written at the time. I hope you enjoyed reading it regardless!


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